How to Score Big with Your Landing Page Design

To describe the way I run marketing, I only need two words: testing wins.

One of our biggest and most recent testing payoffs is a growth in conversion rate from 0% to 6% to 15% when we iteratively changed the design of our thank you page at Lesson.ly.

For the sake of background, our thank you page is displayed when someone downloads a free resource from our site (see a lot of them here). The conversion rate we improved in this set of tests is the amount of people who downloaded something from our site and then signed up for a free trial of our learning software.

Original Design

CR: ~0%

Taking a look at the original thank you page design, you’ll notice that it’s a simple page. It did one thing very well: It completed the transaction.

But it did only that one thing.

Since this was the case, we had a couple trialers filtering in here and there after they downloaded a resource, but they were few and far between.

We thought we could do better, so we tried Alley-oop Design 1.

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

Alley-oop Design 1

By adding a clear call to action to sign up for a free trial, as well as a large visual queue (the big green arrow), we saw a significant and immediate improvement in our conversion rate.

This took the thank you page from completing the single transaction of downloading a resource to opening a new transaction to sign up for a free trial as well.

And open a new transaction it did—6% of the time.

Even with this growth, we thought we could do better. Enter Alley-oop Design 2.

Alley-oop Design 2

CR: 15%

By transforming the large call to action on the right side of the page into an actual signup form, we removed the “middle-man click” and reduced friction to sign up.

Then, to dramatically reduce that friction even more, we autopopulate the form with the same information the individual gave us when they downloaded the resource.

All someone has to do now in order to start a trial is select a password and click the yellow button.

This has taken the conversion rate from 6% to 15% consistently, even after hundreds of people have gone through the process.

Beyond the clear conversion rate growth, here are a few takeaways we’ve learned through this process.

#Alley-oop + #Autofill #FTW

First, the thank you page alley-oop is a must! We’ve found that the best time to re-engage with a prospect is immediately after they have completed an action (highlight to tweet).

This allows you to understand who is more excited about connecting than others and can lead to a decreased time to close. Ask yourself: What can I offer leads immediately when they convert in order to re-convert?

In addition, autofilling the form was very successful. By remembering the information someone has already submitted, you are making the process much less annoying for your leads. In our case, that has paid off well.

Ask yourself: What can I do to reduce friction in my conversion process?

More Wheat Equals More Chaff

With an influx of overall leads, we have seen an increase in both qualified and unqualified leads.

The gut reaction by many to this is to label the change as a failure. If you have a lot of weak leads coming in the door, how is that a success?

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Mitch Causey is the Director of Marketing at Lesson.ly, the easy learning software. Lesson.ly helps companies like Lyft, Angie’s List, and ModCloth improve their employee learning programs by allowing them to build, share, and track their materials all in one place.

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